Brinks Home reduces cost per contact 67% by replacing inbound calls with messaging.

The core problem was structural. Phone-based support was the only real option for most customers, and phone calls are expensive, synchronous, and hard to scale. When demand surged, the team surged with it — or fell behind.

What made the situation particularly draining was the nature of the calls themselves. A large share of inbound volume involved transactions that didn’t require a human at all: making a payment, replacing a battery, adding a sensor, resetting a device. Customers called because there was no other way to get it done. Human agents answered because that was the process.

The consequences compounded:

• Phone queues backed up during peak periods. Customers waited. Satisfaction dropped. The digital NPS hit -55, reflecting a deep frustration with the experience.
• Human agents were buried in repetitive work. On any given day, internal coordination alone involved up to 30 back-and-forth replies in Microsoft Teams per issue. “It was inefficient and morale-draining,” recalls Enes Podbicanin, Director of Digital and Agent Transformation.
• No asynchronous option existed. If a customer wanted to make a payment or troubleshoot a sensor outside of a phone call, there was nowhere to go. Every task required a live agent, real-time.
• Digital tools were limited and unintegrated. The company had no scalable way to guide customers through common tasks on their own terms, which meant self-service rates stayed low.
• Internal workflows were fragmented. Support teams used Microsoft Teams for internal routing — a tool never designed for that purpose — creating delays and confusion at every escalation point.

The team knew the phone-first model had hit its ceiling. The question was how to replace it.

Brinks Home partnered with Quiq to deploy a multi-layered AI platform across both customer-facing and internal operations integrated with the company’s existing systems via API.

Rather than replacing the phone channel overnight, the strategy was to give customers a better option and let adoption follow. Quiq built the infrastructure for digital interactions, and Brinks Home designed the journeys.

Key capabilities deployed:

• SMS-based payment automation. Customers can now complete a payment by replying to a text. There is no login required, no hold time, and no agent involved. The “Pay Now” workflow handles the entire transaction. As Brian Lunseth put it: “It’s efficient and designed for users of all tech comfort levels. Anytime we can empower customers to self-serve and reduce the need for live agent support — by providing the right resource so they can take action themselves — that’s where Quiq offers a variety of powerful tools to make it happen.”
• AI-guided sensor self-onboarding. When a customer acquires a new door or window sensor, they no longer need to call in for setup. An AI-guided flow walks them through activation step by step, including panel pairing, without requiring a human agent.
• Automated troubleshooting flows. Battery replacements, insurance certificate requests, service scheduling — the AI agent handles each of these through structured interactions that collect the right information and take the right action, without escalation.
• A virtual Help Center assistant. Brinks Home rearchitected its customer-facing Help Center using Quiq, enabling the system to draw answers from integrated content. 
• An internal Resolution Line. To replace the fragmented Microsoft Teams routing system, Brinks Home built a dedicated internal tool in Quiq. Human agents select a topic and the request routes automatically to the correct team — no thread clutter, no missed handoffs. “We eliminated the clutter of scattered conversations in Microsoft Teams,” Enes explains. “Agents simply select a topic, and the request is routed through Quiq to the right team.”

Philip Kolterman, SVP and CIO, described the underlying philosophy: “I was impressed with Quiq’s philosophy that customers want to interact with their service providers in an asynchronous environment. I share that belief. Customers prefer async interactions. It gives them flexibility while reducing friction.”

The asynchronous design is not incidental — it is the mechanism. Customers initiate interactions when it suits them, respond when they have a moment, and complete tasks without being tethered to a live agent’s availability.

Making a payment. A customer who previously had to call in to pay a bill can now receive a text, reply “Pay Now,” and complete the transaction without speaking to anyone. The system handles the payment confirmation, processes the amount, and closes the interaction — in the time it would previously have taken to reach a human agent.

Setting up a new sensor. A customer who purchases a new window sensor and needs to add it to their panel would have previously called for guidance through the setup. Now, an AI-guided flow delivers step-by-step activation instructions via messaging, asks clarifying questions based on the customer’s panel model, and confirms when the sensor is live. No call needed.

Troubleshooting a device. A customer experiencing a low-battery alert on a sensor can message the support channel, and the AI agent diagnoses the issue, confirms the device type, and walks the customer through the battery replacement. It can also trigger a service call if hardware replacement is required — collecting the necessary information and routing the request automatically.

Routing an internal request. A support agent who previously needed to post a message in Microsoft Teams and wait for the right person to see it can now open the Resolution Line page, select the request type, and have the inquiry automatically routed to the correct team within seconds. The context travels with it.

For human agents, the transformation removed the most draining parts of the job. Payments, sensor onboarding, standard troubleshooting, and routine escalations no longer reach a human agent’s queue unless the AI flow has already determined that human involvement is necessary.

That shift is visible in the numbers — and in the team. Lower attrition and higher engagement followed the reduction in repetitive work. Agents who previously spent their days fielding the same five questions now handle the interactions that genuinely require judgment: complex account issues, sensitive customer situations, and escalations where a human relationship matters.

The developer team at Brinks Home has also benefited from how Quiq’s AI agents are built. “From a developer’s perspective, AI Studio stands out for its flexibility and usability,” Enes says. “Its support for multiple LLMs, along with the ability to build test cases using real conversations, enables us to quickly implement and validate changes.” The ability to attach test cases to actual customer conversations and rerun them at speed means quality improvements are visible in real time.

In three years, Brinks Home converted a phone-first, high-cost, low-satisfaction support operation into a digital-first model that customers actively prefer. The business impact has been measurable at every level.

• Cost per contact fell 67%. The combination of self-service automation and AI-assisted conversations reduced the volume of live-agent interactions required per customer outcome.
• NPS improved by more than 90 points. Digital channels moved from a -55 Net Promoter Score to +50 — crossing from deeply negative to industry-leading.
• Digital transactions grew from 12% to 60%. In under three years, nearly two-thirds of all customer transactions now complete through digital channels.
• Inbound call volume dropped 30%. Over the same three-year period, a significant share of what would have been phone interactions shifted to messaging.
• CSAT increased 18% in 12 months. Expanded self-service options have driven measurable improvement in how customers rate their experience.
• Human agents are doing better work. With repetitive tasks offloaded to automation, agents focus on the interactions that require them — and morale, productivity, and retention have followed.